Kiara Advani

Kiara Advani, born Alia Advani, is an Indian actress who works mainly in Hindi films and has also appeared in Telugu and, most recently, Kannada cinema.^[1] Born in Mumbai on 31 July 1991, she worked briefly as a teacher before making her acting debut in 2014 with the comedy Fugly, and she rose to wider fame through Kabir Singh and Good Newwz (both 2019), the war biopic Shershaah (2021) and the horror comedy Bhool Bhulaiyaa 2 (2022).^[1] She is one of the highest-paid actresses in India and has received an IIFA Award, two Zee Cine Awards and two Filmfare nominations for Best Actress.^[1]

Her recent years have been a mixed period. Two very expensive action films in 2025, Game Changer and War 2, both failed at the box office, and her 2026 Kannada-English film Toxic, opposite Yash and directed by Geetu Mohandas, drew mostly negative reviews from critics even though some praised her performance.^[1][3] In 2026 she was also honoured at The Hollywood Reporter's Women in Entertainment event.^[2]

Away from the cameras, she is married to the actor Sidharth Malhotra, and the couple's daughter, Saraayah, was born in July 2025.^[1] On 7 October 2026 they announced through a joint Instagram post that they are expecting their second child.^[5][6]

Advani was born Alia Advani in Bombay (now Mumbai) on 31 July 1991.^[1] Her father, Jagdeep Advani, is a Sindhi Hindu businessman, and her mother, Genevieve Jaffrey, is a teacher whose father came from Lucknow and whose mother had Scottish, Irish, Portuguese and Spanish ancestry.^[1] She has a younger brother, Mishaal, who is a musician, and through her maternal family she is related to the film stars Ashok Kumar and Saeed Jaffrey, who were her step-great-grandfather and great-uncle respectively.^[1]

She studied at the Cathedral and John Connon School in Mumbai and then at Jai Hind College, where she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in mass communications.^[1] She has said in interviews that she wanted to be an actress from childhood and that her father, after watching 3 Idiots, decided to let her follow what she wanted to do.^[1] Before she entered films, she worked briefly as a teacher.^[1]

She changed her first name from Alia to Kiara before the release of her first film in 2014. She has said that the actor Salman Khan suggested the change because Alia Bhatt was already an established actress, and that she picked the name Kiara after the character played by Priyanka Chopra in Anjaana Anjaani (2010).^[1] She began her screen career with the ensemble comedy Fugly (2014), opposite the newcomer Mohit Marwah, and although she earned a Screen Awards nomination for Best Female Debut, the film failed, and she has admitted feeling demotivated as offers became scarce afterwards.^[1]

Advani's breakthrough came two years after her debut, when she played Sakshi, the wife of cricketer MS Dhoni, in the sports biopic M.S. Dhoni: The Untold Story (2016), which earned over Rs 2.16 billion worldwide.^[1] After the failed thriller Machine (2017), she worked with Karan Johar for the first time in the Netflix anthology Lust Stories (2018), where she played a sexually dissatisfied wife opposite Vicky Kaushal, and made her Telugu debut with Mahesh Babu in Bharat Ane Nenu (2018), which grossed Rs 2.25 billion worldwide.^[1] Her second Telugu film, Vinaya Vidheya Rama (2019) with Ram Charan, was unsuccessful, and she also appeared in a special role in Kalank.^[1]

The turning point was Sandeep Reddy Vanga's Kabir Singh (2019), opposite Shahid Kapoor, which grossed over Rs 3.78 billion and remains her highest-grossing release even though critics attacked its portrayal of misogyny and toxic masculinity.^[1] She followed it with the comedy Good Newwz alongside Akshay Kumar, Kareena Kapoor Khan and Diljit Dosanjh; both films earned over Rs 2 billion in India and ranked among the highest-grossing Hindi films of 2019, and she won the IIFA Award for Best Supporting Actress for Good Newwz.^[1]

In 2020 she starred in the Netflix film Guilty, about a sexual assault allegation, for which she earned a Filmfare OTT Awards nomination, and then in Laxmii with Akshay Kumar and Indoo Ki Jawani.^[1] Laxmii drew negative reviews but strong viewership on Disney+ Hotstar, while Indoo Ki Jawani was not successful.^[1] Her role as Dimple Cheema, the girlfriend of army officer Vikram Batra, in Shershaah (2021) opposite Sidharth Malhotra earned her a Filmfare Best Actress nomination, and the film became the most-streamed Indian film on Amazon Prime Video.^[1]

2022 was a strong year. Bhool Bhulaiyaa 2, with Kartik Aaryan and Tabu, earned over Rs 2.6 billion worldwide, and the family drama Jugjugg Jeeyo, in which she and Varun Dhawan played an unhappily married couple, earned Rs 1.35 billion.^[1] She then starred in the comic thriller Govinda Naam Mera and reunited with Aaryan in the romantic drama Satyaprem Ki Katha (2023), a modest commercial success that brought her a second Filmfare nomination for Best Actress.^[1]

In 2025 she appeared in two action films that were each reported to have cost about Rs 4 billion: the Telugu film Game Changer, with Ram Charan, and War 2, in which she played Wing Commander Kavya Luthra opposite Hrithik Roshan.^[1] Critics said she had little to do in either; War 2 had the biggest opening weekend of her career, but both films were box-office bombs.^[1]

In 2026 she made her Kannada-cinema debut in Toxic: A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups, a gangster drama in which she plays Nadia, the mother of Yash's character, alongside Nayanthara, Huma Qureshi, Tara Sutaria and Rukmini Vasanth.^[1][3] To play a circus artist she trained with international performers for Cirque du Soleil-style aerial routines, and she kept shooting while pregnant to avoid delaying the film.^[1] The film was released worldwide on 26 August 2026 and received mostly negative reviews, though some critics praised the performances of Yash and Advani, and its box-office total is reported at roughly Rs 3.2 to 3.4 billion.^[3] In June 2026 she marked 12 years in the film industry.^[4]

For several years, Advani did not comment on persistent rumours of a relationship with her Shershaah co-star Sidharth Malhotra, which had circulated since 2020.^[1] They married on 7 February 2023 in a traditional Hindu ceremony in Jaisalmer, Rajasthan, and their wedding photo became the most-liked Instagram post in India at the time.^[1]

The couple's first child, a daughter, was born on 15 July 2025, and they announced her name, Saraayah Malhotra, in late November 2025.^[1] In January 2026 Advani shared a birthday video for Malhotra in which she sang to him and the cake was decorated with the words "Saraayah's papa", and in May 2026 she spoke about parenting and about the values she hopes to teach her daughter.^[4] On 7 October 2026, the couple announced their second pregnancy in a joint Instagram post showing Saraayah holding a pair of baby booties, with a caption saying they were "blessed once again", and she shared photos of a family beach holiday days later.^[5][6][7]

She supports a number of social causes. She promoted Quaker's "Feed A Child" initiative with the Smile Foundation and The Quint's #SpreadTheLight campaign, and during the COVID-19 crisis she donated to the "I Stand With Humanity" campaign to help daily-wage workers in the film and television industry.^[1] She has performed at the opening ceremony of the Women's Premier League in March 2023 and at an event in Doha in October 2023, and has co-hosted the Filmfare, Screen and Zee Cine award ceremonies.^[1]

She is an endorser for Audi, for which she became the first female brand ambassador in 2021, as well as Galaxy chocolate, Colgate, Slice, Myntra, Mango, Tira Beauty and Quaker.^[1] Kroll estimated her brand value at about US$60 million in 2023, the third-highest among Indian actresses, and she appeared among India's highest tax-paying celebrities in a 2024 report.^[1] She ranked sixth and fourth on The Times of India's Most Desirable Woman list in 2019 and 2020, and in 2022 GQ India named her one of its 30 most influential young Indians.^[1]

Estimates of her wealth vary widely. One October 2026 report puts her net worth at over Rs 41 crore, while other sites give figures between about Rs 40 crore and Rs 125 crore; because these are unaudited estimates, they should be treated as approximate.^[8][9]